Welcome to Tuesday. What ails ya?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

We're fast approaching the end of the aughts. What are your highlights and lowlights?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

From last Tuesday through Sunday early morning I was without any internet access whatsoever. It wasn't planned--I stayed in a house that didn't have it, and I could neither pull in any wireless from nearby, nor did I have time to go to a local wi-fi spot.

I know some people find this liberating, but in the middle of the peak of grading season, I don't. I would rather have gone without indoor plumbing. How's that for a pampered western-elite perspective on what's important?

What's on your mind?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

What's on your mind? Me, I'm thinking about the middle-semester crush of grading, meetings, conferences, and &c.

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Yammer, yammer, yammer . . . .

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Some random stuff from the week:

I wish that this was the worst of the hypocrisy and cruelty forced upon us by eight years of the Bush administration. But it wasn't, this was:

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I'm no presidential historian, but these would be interesting to listen to. And I'll probably read this, although I do still have some Clinton fatigue.


There's more rambling below in Readmoreville . . .




Oh, really? What a surprise:

The overwhelming majority of Iowans - 92 percent - say gay marriage has brought no real change to their lives.

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What's funny to me is that the topic of "should there should be free speech on the internet" is even under debate. Duh.

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Blame Shakespeare.

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It's about time.

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What this boils down to is "we've given up on trying to get the high schools to do better, so deal with it. Bitches."

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What telling about the discussion of "why college costs so much and what can be done about it" (free subscription required) is that nowhere does the discussion of "let's cut our expensive football program" come up. Instead it's "let's increase faculty workload." Typical.

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The Teaching American History initiative is an excellent way to bring professional development to teachers. It would be a real shame to see this program cut.

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You're probably getting tired of hearing me go on about tenure at KCTCS, but this is a bit of good news. No, great news!

[Attorney General Jack] Conway's analysis rips apart the KCTCS board's argument that the state law that created the community-technical college system in 1997 gave it broad authority to set employment policies for the system and its institutions. But that same law, the attorney general notes, unambiguously states that new faculty members at KCTCS "shall earn tenure," and that clear-cut statement takes precedence over more general assertions of authority. "Although the board has been given 'exclusive authority' to govern KCTCS," Conway writes, "such authority cannot be over and against that of the General Assembly," which enacted the law and its specific provision assuring tenure for faculty members.

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Friday at right about the time people start cracking a cold one--the end of civilization.

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Speaking of Friday--the beer of the week is Left-Hand Brewery's Oktoberfest. Even though it gets only middling marks on BeerAdvocate, I had it on tap the other day and found it to be refreshing, full-bodied (in the Marzen style) and quite, quite good. They make a number of other, very good beers.

Their website is cool, but the Flash gets annoying after a bit. It also automatically resizes the window in Firefox--major annoyance.

Labels: AndrewMC, Friday Ramblings, Open Thread

How schools "calculate" the "percentage of full-time faculty" for rankings.

Combating discrimination on campus.

Find a review of some new scholarship on Alger Hiss here.

More money doesn't necessarily mean more graduates.

I thought this was timely, given the recent addition of about a half-dozen "studies" programs to the curriculum at my university.

Re-think that grading style! [subscription required]

New faculty? Good advice.

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Look, my first computer—a Terak 8510/a. I got it right before the Apple II/e that I had for years. That was followed by a Mac SE, then a Mac 7200, then an iMac. But that Terak was a workhorse, and I learned to program in Pascal on it. That was a great beginner language--easy to learn, easy to use.

What was your first computer?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. However, it is also the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 being signed into law. I mourn for the victims of war, and of the atomic bombing. But I think that this is also a day to rejoice in all the ways that the Voting Rights Act made possible sweeping progress in American democracy, culminating in the election of Barack Obama.

How do you think American democracy has changed in the past 44 years? Or, not changed.

Labels: AndrewMC, atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Open Thread, Voting Rights Act

I'm still mulling over this story:

The descendants of an African chief who was hanged and decapitated by a Dutch general 171 years ago reluctantly accepted the return of his severed head Thursday, still angry even as the Dutch tried to right a historic wrong.

HuffPo Story

The story has all the elements of colonialism and post-colonialism mixed in with a bit of the bizarre. But it's not clear why the writer thinks that the Ahanta were "reluctant" to take the head back. Sounds to me like they were just pissed.



Interestingly, other writers describe the mood as "angry" or "tense."
Finding Dulcinea

The BBC probably has the most complete story on the wire services:
BBC

Anyway, it's an interesting tale.

Use this as an open thread.

Labels: AndrewMC, colonialism, Ghana, Open Thread, post-colonialism

Tomorrow, June 28, is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. While other groups seeking civil rights had been quite active across the country, the GLBT community had not. As Wiki put it: "American gays and lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s faced a legal system more anti-homosexual than those of some Warsaw Pact countries."

[interesting note: as I was reading that part and clicking back and forth, this rather excellent section disappeared from the Wiki entry--edited out. It described the rampant persecution of homosexuals in the 1950s and 1960s. Gotta love Wikipedia.]

The Wikipedia article isn't bad, all things considered. But you'll also find good stuff here, here, and a documentary here.

Use this as an open thread.

Labels: lgbt history, Open Thread, stonewall

On June 19, 1865, slaves in Galveston, Texas, received word of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Local celebrations of that day have evolved into a national remembrance of every "drop of blood drawn with the lash."

Some places to visit:
http://www.juneteenth.com/
http://www.juneteenth.us/

Use this as an open thread.

[Update] (by Jeremy): Our former contributor Gene Keyes (Esperanto42) sends us a historically-oriented critique of world maps by Buckminster Fuller and B.J.S. Cahill. A bit inside-baseball, but fascinating if you love maps.

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

I thought of this line from Obama's Cairo speech today:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.

Nothing else I'm thinking about today's events is printable.

Consider this an open thread.

Labels: Ahistoricality, domestic terror, holocaust, holocaust denial, Open Thread

Historians, for the most part, aren't like normal people.

Most people organize their year by a 365-day, 52-week calendar. Most historians organize theirs into a pair of fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen week blocs. The other twelve weeks are spent hibernating in caves around the world called "archives."

As we prepare to end one of our blocs our blood pressure rises, we tune out the rest of the world, we become forgetful, and our tempers often become frayed.

I hope your semester ends well.

Unitary Moonbat is on the Rec List at Daily Kos.

If you aren't a regular watcher, you might try to catch a repeat of CSI:New York's recent episode "Yahrzeit" [link contains spoilers if you click through to the episode] is about as good a treatment of the Holocaust as one could find on a fictional TV show. Ed Asner's performance was incredibly moving, I thought.

What's on your mind?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

President Obama, 4 April 2009, Strasbourg [via]:

"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

"And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

"Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

"And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone."

Passover is my nostalgic holiday. That and Thanksgiving, I guess: these are the holidays where the family comes together, or the community, or friends (or, since you can have multiple seders over Passover, all of the above!), where the food is distinctive and deeply rooted. Also, the preparation is fairly intense, so there's a period of anticipation and planning that hightens the experience.

So if you're wondering what I've been doing this last week, it's the usual, plus a bunch of extra shopping and planning. And next week will be a cavalcade of ritual: recipe following, haggadah-reading, actual seders, informal get-togethers, and more recipe following (I'm a very improvisational cook, usually, but not with Passover recipes; if you don't get them right, the results can be really unpleasant).

What are you up to these days?

Labels: Ahistoricality, Open Thread

I hope everyone's semester is going well.

I was looking through Jeff Pasley's The Tyranny of Printers again, and it got me to thinking that there's never really been a time when the press was not biased. When did we start thinking it should be?

In the past several weeks Winter Rabbit has had several amazing diaries on DailyKos. He's been rescued and on the recommended list so often it's hard to keep track.

As I was reading through documents in the British National Archives this past week, it amazed me how often people expressed pride in their liberal government.

What's on your mind?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Well, I'm out of town for the week, working on some research in England. Tough life, yes.

Mark Grimsley, over at Blog them Out of the Stone Age, highlights a must-see documentary that followed George Wallace and JFK during the Civil Rights crisis of 1963.

Richard Bensel places Obama, Lincoln, and the current fiscal crisis in historical context.

And, the ever-insightful Historiann keeps writing things people really ought to read..

What's on your minds?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

Some thematic news:

The Rocky Mountain News--a paper I took for 4 years while living in Denver--has closed its doors. Some might argue that this is symbolic of the death of the newspaper in general, and the rise of so-called "new" media. But perhaps its parent corporation was poorly managed, and perhaps the existence of two newspapers in the one town was too much. In the 1980s San Diego's two newspapers, the Union and the Tribune, merged to form the Union-Tribune. Saved!

Meanwhile, the ever-eloquent Historiann reminds us that electronic delivery ain't all it's cracked up to be. Her entry here reminds me why I love reading blogs.

And, "The Rest of the Story" is over.

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

I thought it was kind of odd that J. Crew would send me one of their catalogs--I'm not their target audience. Odder still was that it came to my office. Odder still that others in my department got the same catalog.

Except that it wasn't a catalog. It does seem to be the "J Crew-ization" of American history, by the looks of the cover. But several of the office workers--male and female students--said "Oooh, that's hot. What is that? I'll take that course, and read that book." I almost cried.



What's on your mind.

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread

I've still got Dan Cohen's excellent "Shovel-Ready" post rattling around my head this morning. I wonder if we'll see this phrase used in grant applications?

The Tenured Radical makes a good point relevant to the other silly season.

So, the unemployed Wall Street-types now hold "unemployment parties" to network. Kind of a meet-and-greet where job seekers can meet employers. The job seekers wear pink bracelets to signal their employment woes. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that this appropriation of the bracelet color for Breast Cancer Awareness is more than a little crass? Add it to the list, I suppose.

A little birdie tells me that this blog is blocked in China.


What's on your mind?

Labels: AndrewMC, Open Thread